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by Francoise Coffrant,
Director of the periodicals "Arc" and "Arc International"
The Medical Commission of the International Olympic Committee has informed all delegations and athletes who are going to take part in the Olympic Games in Moscow that the "anti-doping" tests will be particularly strict. Everything must be done to discourage the use of doping substances.
The American delegation for its part has acquired a highly perfected data processing plant designed to improve the performance of athletes during training. Colonel Miller, who is in charge of this plant, stated last September that he was also relying on his country's technology to prepare the Games.
To improve performances without doping is the task set himself by Gideon Ariel, a former athlete and now professor at the University of Massachusetts, who has been studying the human body with the help of computers for about ten years now.
Helped by the company which markets the instruments, he has recently agreed to supervise the training sessions specially prepared for the United States Olympic Committee.
Gideon Ariel, born at Tel Aviv in 1940, is far from unknown in sports circles. He was a member of the Israeli Olympic team at the 1960 Games in Rome as well as the 1964 Games in Tokyo, throwing the discus in which he is still holder of the record for Israel.
After his military service in Israel, he won a scholarship to Wyoming University. He then attended courses at the University of Massachusetts where he obtained a doctorate in data processing. Having becoming an American citizen and a professor, he founded a biomechanical analysis company at Amherst, in Massachusetts.
This company, CBA-Computerized Biomechanical Analysis-the first research company specialising in this type of study, was created for the specific purpose of improving top-level athletic performances. Encouraged by the results, CBA has during the last five years widened its field of research to include industrial products, sports equipment, and safety precautions at places of work.
In actual fact computerised biomechanical analysis existed before Ariel: it will be remembered that the Swedish scientist Ingvar Fredericson studied the movements of race horses for 10 years and discovered that their hindquarters were submitted to almost dangerous strains on racetracks that were as a general rule too hard in the straight sections and not hard enough in the curves. Ariel's method is based on the idea that the human eye, in its inability to see whether an athlete has turned his shoulder one degree too far to the left or if his foot is a centimetre out of position, is unable on its own to quantify the movements of the human body accurately.
"The important things in competition-timing, the relative speeds of a dozen parts and segments of the body, changes in centre of gravity-must all be able to be measured, weighed and compared in order to work out an indicative value."
His research thus led him to seek the help of technology and to work out a system of calculation based on the following principle
- High-speed film of the athlete in action, up
to 10,000 frames a second if necessary.
- Frame by frame decoding, retransmission
by means of an electronic light pen, on a
screen studded on both sides with 20,000
small directional microphones. The coor
dinates of a point on the screen touched
by this sound pen are recorded by the computer (a Data General "Nova"), which produces a graph, taking into account all the data in terms of force, direction, acceleration and speed of the parts of the body studied. </